Image by Aamir Mohd Khan from Pixabay
By Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi
What does it mean for us, as followers of the Dharma, to practice compassion under the conditions of today’s world? Is it enough to nurture friendly feelings to everyone we meet and occasionally extend help to those who cross our path? Or do the ethical imperatives of the Dharma push us to do more, to actively respond to the suffering we see smothering the lives of so many people across this planet? What are the right priorities we should adopt both in our personal lives and in the steps we take in our role as citizens?
These questions became particularly acute for me last week, provoked by two news stories that caught my attention. The stories delivered stark reminders of the need to wrestle thoughtfully with the terrible fate endured by far too many around the world, a fate that is often connected to our own nation’s policies and our own ingrained indifference to the plight of those living in distant lands.
One story, on the PBS Newshour, concerned the escalating hunger crisis in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has long been one of the world’s poorest nations, a landlocked country with a weak economy whose people have had to endure decades of violent conflicts by rival militant groups. Two years ago the Taliban again came to power, establishing an Islamist theocratic state that embraces the most regressive interpretation of Sharia law. The policies imposed by the Taliban have been especially hard on women. They require women to fully cover their bodies from head to foot, prohibit them from working outside the home, and prevent girls from pursuing an education beyond primary school. In response, the international community has inflicted harsh economic sanctions on Afghanistan and subjected the country to diplomatic isolation.
One consequence of these stringent policy decisions has been to push the Afghan people into the claws of agonizing hunger. Fifteen million Afghans—more than a third of the country—struggle to get enough to eat each day. Thirteen million had been utterly dependent on the World Food Programme for their sustenance. Yet just recently, due to a funding shortfall, the WFP had to cut ten million Afghans from its rolls, reducing the number of people they can feed to just three million. This leaves ten million people with no reliable access to food just as the summer ends and the winds of winter begin to blow.
Hsiao-Wei Lee, the WFP’s country director, says the agency now faces the grim choice of “[choosing] between families that are hungry and those that are starving.” Many families can’t afford to eat more than once a day. The anguish of Afghan parents was aptly conveyed by a statement from one woman quoted in a report by Save the Children: “Sometimes we only cook one meal a week—a soup without meat. In between, we eat bread one to two times a day. It makes me sad to know my children are malnourished because we don’t have anything to eat, and I don’t know how I can make them better.”
To get food for the family, parents are sending their children into the streets to beg. Mothers too are sneaking out at night to beg. Many are offering up their daughters in marriage even at ages as young as seven or eight. Such painful sacrifices help to reduce the number of mouths to feed and may also bring in a dowry that can be used to purchase food.
The other report that came to my attention last week was a video segment on Democracy Now! concerning the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The hosts interviewed Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who recently returned from a visit to the Congo. The DRC faces what Egeland calls “the largest hunger crisis in the world,” with 25 million people on the verge of starvation. Egeland described the crisis in the Congo as “beyond belief” and said: “Nowhere else in the world is there more than 25 million people experiencing violence, hunger, disease, neglect. And nowhere in the world is there such a small international response to help, to aid, to end all of this suffering.”
The root of the problem, Egeland explains, is the violence that has engulfed the country, especially in the north and east. In the east alone, 150 armed groups are fighting for territory, and the civilian population is caught in the crossfire, forced to seek refuge in small camps, where they are crammed together in abject misery. The humanitarian effort to address the crisis is severely underfunded, with only a third of the necessary funding at hand. The U.S. gives half of this amount, but much of the world offers nothing. Sadly, the U.S. now intends to cut 20 percent of its humanitarian aid from the last fiscal year and to make further reductions next year, just at a time when needs are exploding.
Egeland states the strong moral case for more assistance: “The neglect of suffering in DR Congo is part of a gaping global gap between the resources pledged for aid and the needs on the ground. Right around the world, an immense funding shortfall is developing, depriving millions of the most basic needs, even food. The people of eastern DR Congo desperately need the international community to step up financially, politically, and diplomatically to close the gap.”
The hunger crisis that grips Afghanistan and the DR Congo is by no means confined to these two nations. These are merely two hotspots along an arc of hunger that stretches from Mongolia and Myanmar in the east through South Asia, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel nations, and across the Atlantic to Haiti and Central America. The WFP states that conflict, economic shocks, climate disasters, and rising fertilizer costs have combined to create a world food crisis of unprecedented scale, with close to 800 million people today staring chronic hunger in the face. The WFP puts the choice before us in stark terms: “Act now to save lives and invest in solutions that ensure food security, stability, and peace for all, or see people around the world facing rising hunger.”
To avert this crisis calls for a concerted, determined, unrelenting effort by the international community, with the heaviest responsibility falling on the affluent nations, which must increase their share of humanitarian assistance. Acting through the UN, these nations must also work together to resolve the conflicts that are tearing the poorer nations apart. Conflict, according to the WFP, is the primary force driving hunger and miring their populations in poverty. Admittedly, that is a hard call to meet when relations between these global powers themselves are being strained by rising tensions.
The rich nations often complain that they lack sufficient funds to contribute to the international agencies battling hunger, but such complaints are belied by statistics. The WFP says that it needs $25 billion to meet its funding requirements for 2023. This might seem like a lot of money, but it turns out to be a tiny fraction of what the major powers spend on their militaries. In 2023, the U.S. allocated $877 billion to its military, China $292 billion. Total global military spending is currently over $2.24 trillion. Couldn’t the major military powers shave off even 10 percent of their military budgets and use those funds for food assistance and peace initiatives? It’s shameful to see far more money being devoted to destroying life than to preserving and protecting life.
From a Buddhist perspective, these distortions in our global priorities reveal the grip that the dark force of the defilements—greed, hate, delusion, and their offshoots—have on the human heart. These forces operate not only through individual minds but also through the systems, structures, and institutions that underlie our collective lives. What we need to tackle the horrific pandemics of hunger, poverty, and violence—as seen in Afghanistan and the Congo—is an unwavering commitment to the ethical imperatives of compassion. Especially for Buddhists, compassion must be more than just a beautiful emotion or an uplifting rhetorical affirmation of the vow to save all sentient beings. Compassion must be conjoined with a sense of conscience and a firm pledge to rescue others from suffering. For compassion to live up to its name, it must come to expression in action.
The link between compassion as an internal state and the commitment to conscientious action is solidarity. Solidarity is the ability to identify with others and resonate with their pain and suffering. Solidarity is built on the understanding—or rather, the visceral insight—that others are in essence like ourselves, that the differences between us are superficial, that at bottom we all aspire for the same thing: for happiness, safety, and fulfillment. When the sense of solidarity stirs the heart, compassion spills forth in effective, transformative, redemptive action.
The Buddha’s teachings provide us with the values and ethical ideals needed to address the momentous crises facing humankind, particularly—from our perspective at Buddhist Global Relief—to tackle the plight of global hunger. The Dharma offers the moral values embedded in the four divine abodes—boundless loving-kindness, compassion, empathy, and impartiality. It extols the sublime virtue of generosity (dāna-pāramitā), and it calls on us to live our lives out of compassion for the world (lokānukampā). Our task is to draw upon these sublime values and ideals as spurs to action. This can be done by acting through organizations like BGR, the Tzuchi Foundation, the Clear View Project, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and others engaged in socially transformative action. But we also have to fulfill our duties as citizens. Our individual voices matter, and we should use them to call on our elected officials, governments, and international bodies to make the abolition of hunger and poverty a burning priority.
Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi is the founder and chair of Buddhist Global Relief.
